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Wednesday, 15 November 2006

Rome returns. Also: Oh, Canada!

This joyful news, stumbled across on Histriomastix: HBO's Rome will finally get a second season in January.

This is joyful because Tboy's Tivo has been impatiently looking for new episodes since last November, shortly after the camera pulled back from Ciarán Hinds' bloody corpse--and then cut to Lindsay Duncan, being all chilly and mean and smug.

Because really, after her seeing her Titania/Hippolyta in the RSC's Midsummer at the Kennedy Center back in 1996, Tboy will watch more or less anything with Lindsay Duncan in it. (He's even willing to forgive her Under the Tuscan Sun, because let's face it, her crazy-ass expat was by far the least bad thing about that piece of crap.)

Tboy had more or less given up on Rome, he confesses, though he supposes he might have checked the HBO web site, which has long promised a follow-up season. Of course Tboy doesn't generally put a lot of faith in such things until shooting starts. Apparently shooting started back in the summer, when Tboy wasn't paying much attention anymore.

Also: Heaven bless them, those wacky Canadians have apparently started selling the second-season Slings & Arrows DVDs here in the U.S.; they're finally, finally, finally available on Netflix. And you'll notice, over there in the right-hand column, that they've materialized at the top of Tboy's queue...

Comments

Funny that you're so excited about the return of this show, because I've been in a perpetual state of wonder since the end of the first season as to whether anyone in the world, other than myself, witnessed its glories!

How could something we knew was going to happen from the opening credits of Season 1 have been so face shatteringly shocking?

I do worry that the show might lose a certain tone and quality without the presence of Cieran Hinds, but if the story is now moving on to the war between Octavius and Marc Anthony, then perhaps that alone will suffice (because I hate to say it, I'm not sure how much Lindsay Duncan will be a factor in the coming season).

I did hear rumours that regardless of the success of this season, it will be the end of the show for good, as the production cost and relatively low ratings of the first season are not lucrative bargaining points to make it an ongoing series.

Shame, could have eventually become an updated HBO edition of the BBC's "I, Claudius" in a few more seasons.

And as the series shows us, they've miraculously discovered that the Roman tongue was startingly similar to a British accent . . . so I had a good shot.